This volume revisits, in a less friendly way, Schelling’s Freedom-Treatise (GA 42). Contrasting Schelling’s concept of existence with Jaspers’ and Kierkegaard’s human-centered conceptions provides an occasion for differentiating “existence” in SZ from the latter. However, Heidegger also locates the roots of Schelling’s distinction between ground and existence in “the supreme and ultimate instance” of being as willing. As “the summit of the metaphysics of German idealism,” the treatise contains “the essential core of all Western metaphysics,” the conception of being as constant presence in the form of the will—and a prelude to nihilism (1f, 118–22). Schelling’s articulation of the latter as the “will to love” lies between Hegel’s “will of knowing” and Nietzsche’s “will to power” (102).